April 2025: Pepe – Ana Duffy
Pepe
Your name is Jose, but they call you Pepe. Not that you know the sound of your name anymore, none of them: you lost your hearing almost completely. I watch you walking straight, back from the barber shop. First Wednesday of every month. Always a buzz cut. Useless nowadays, as there’s hardly any hair left. And yet; that’s what they choked you with: discipline. Discipline and a sense of duty that now falls straight into the one potato-two carrots-half a corncob-three garlic cloves-soup. On Tuesdays. At six. The same sense of duty that goes into polishing the brown shoes that don’t march, that don’t even walk past the Cooperativa Obrera to get the cooking oil. (The oil that doesn’t come in a yellow tin now, because brands don’t know what sense of duty is.) And yet, come Thursday night and in comes the brown betún. (The one in the round, brown tin. They didn’t change that one, fortunately.)
I watch you sit in front of the telly to watch your whateveryouwatchnow. I did try, but you don’t get Netflix; or Netflix falls outside the scope of martial routines. You watch your whateveryouwatchnow on Mondays. Because Tuesday is soup day, and the rest of the week is waiting time, save Thursday that is shoe day. I tried to enlighten you with the concept of binge watching. But you were counting the garlic cloves. It was Tuesday. So the narrative didn’t fly.
Last week I came to see you on one of the waiting for your whateveryouwatchnow-day and found you sitting in the patio de baldosas:
“Que pasa, abuelo?” I asked. You looked at me, not quite tuning into my talk, and then looked at the fern in the pot. I yelled a bit, gauging decibels as if sound-checking the space around you. You got it this time but went back to the fern in the pot. The fern is thirsty and the pot has a crack. The impending catastrophe of irreversibly shrivelled fern and more than a cubic meter of decade-old soil spreading in the patio de baldosas doesn’t seem to be an issue. But you still look worn-out.
“Que pasa, abuelo?” I try again. What’s going on?
“La Cooperativa Obrera,” you say.
And then it clicks. They are closing the oldest grocery shop in Puerto Blanco. The one with the mural with the two donkeys tied to a rope. In the first square they are pulling to opposite sides and the rope is too short to let them get to their food. In the second square they brainstorm: a conflict resolution session, and the last square shows them ‘cooperating’ and walking in the same direction to eat. La Cooperativa Obrera it reads under the donkeys. Walmart? Carrefour? I whisper and you stand up half-smiling.
It’s Tuesday, and already quarter to six. I pat the dying fern and I hear the water running. The red pot, not as red anymore, is filling up, and I peel three garlic cloves for you.
Ana Duffy
Right Left Write’s April prompt was Character Sketch.
Find out more about Right Left Write at www.queenslandwriters.org.au/rightleftwrite.
Right Left Write’s April prompt was Character Sketch.